"Avatar" director James Cameron has been hit with a lawsuit by a writer who claims that the plot for the hit sci-fi movie was lifted from his own project.

In the suit, which was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court Thursday, Eric Ryder claims that he entered into an agreement with Cameron's production company, Lightstorm Entertainment, to develop a movie based on his story "KRZ 2068."

According to the suit, the project was envisioned as "an environmentally themed 3-D epic about a corporation's colonization and plundering of a distant moon's lush and wondrous natural setting."

After working on the project for nearly two years, Ryder alleges, Lightstorm put the kibosh on it, explaining that "no one would be interested in an environmentally themed science fiction feature film."